Chris Elliott joins [and leaves] Boarding Area
 

So apparently Randy Peterson invited Chris Elliott to join BA but Chris has not yet decided.

As Chris notes in the link above, several BA bloggers have been repeatedly critical of his miles & points articles - VFTW has a particularly strong "feud" of sorts.

The occasions where I've read Chris' pieces on FFPs, usually from a link by VFTW, I think he is way off base in his FFP critiques...to the point of being either intentionally or unintentionally uninformed.

Chris' linked article has a spot to vote on what you think he should do, for whatever that's worth.

I'll leave you with this - from a post on BA today, apparently one of the biggest fans of Chris Elliott is Delta Points.

I actually agree with some of Mr. Elliot's arguments:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artic...quit-yours-now

• FFPs are part of the reason coach experiences for non-FFers are pretty miserable. Giving you an escape valve from 30 inch pitch coach is part of the FFP value proposition.
• FFP terms are quite literally "we can change them any time we please, you have no rights".
• For a lot of the awards customers based in the USA are interested in (domestic awards), the awards DO have a lot of restrictions. Yes, I know you can fly to the Maldives in premium classes on them. The majority of America don't have passports.

I don't think having a different perspective on BA would be bad at all.

And with 54% Yes, he's joining.

unfortunately, this may be about obtaining traffic of big debates between him and others

God, please no.

what other explanation is there?

unless there is some kind of optimism (IMHO baseless) that he will focus on negative aspects of loyalty programs that "everyone" agrees with on the new BA blog

or maybe its just to be able to point to and say they have a counter perspective

But this could make for some interesting fun -- at least for a short while, no?

I'm always down for a good cage fight!

And it will provide some bloggers reasons for CC pushing posts:

"Why Chris Elliott is wrong about [Insert Program Here] and in fact you can get an amazing value out of it by getting [Insert CC Affiliate Link Here]...

For future reference, here are a few snippets from Mr Elliott (from the blog post referenced by the OP and his comments below it):

"I'm America's number-one loyalty program critic."

"I care about you, my friends and readers."

"[...] it's my policy not to comment on a colleague's work." (<-- may only refer to people writing for newspapers, though, not bloggers)

"I won't be writing about credit card churning any time soon."

It'll probably be pointless but I doubt it'll be dull.

Some of VFTW's dullest posts are the ones where he's responding to CE's utter nonsense.

It's like someone taking The Onion seriously. :rolleyes:

I don't think it's utter nonsense at all.

Just because we're willing to jump through hoops and run mazes airlines set up to get the cheese at the end doesn't mean it works out for all the rats. In fact, it's quite to our advantage that most people consider what we do to be obscurantism; we'd never see an F seat to MLE if everyone tried to cash in all their miles at once and it was easy to do so. If all frequent flyer programs went to a model that was quite straightforward ("Here's your kickback for your business, it's (x)% of the fares you buy") it would be very customer friendly for most people... and quite horrible for the tiny percentage of us who know how to turn pennies on the dollar into Dom and suites on an A380. Thus the :rolleyes: about WN and the shrieks of terror as DL and UA start slowly edging in that direction.

Mr. Elliott is quite right in thinking that FFPs are meant to be suckers games for the rubes, and that the fact some people know how to beat the game doesn't change that, any more than the fact that some people can count cards at blackjack and play winning video poker doesn't change the fact that the house wins most of the time at the casino, enough to build really nice casinos.

I think a better analogy is couponing.

Most folks use a coupon once in a while, if ever.

Some obsess over them and do extreme couponing. Even have blogs and hold seminars to teach others how to do extreme couponing.

That does not mean that coupons are a sucker's game for casual couponers. Which is CE's proposition. It just means that some folks are willing to (and/or are compelled by OCD to ;)) spend more time and effort on it.

EC, you're quite right, of course, and so the pitch is typically, "Read my blog and click on my links and I can teach you how to be the successful rat!" They make it look easy and not life-consuming. There's no risk either. Hah! There's a reason I neither churn nor do MS.

What Elliott misses, though, is that you can still learn and cherry-pick some worthwhile tricks that are neither time consuming nor risky. In other words, just because it's mostly quasi-dishonest hucksterism doesn't mean that it's 100% hucksterism 100% of the time. For example, I'm a DFW hub captive who doesn't travel that much anymore, but over the past year I've still snagged a couple of essentially free 100,000 mile/point offers that are, or can turn into, AA miles or flights. (The fine print: everyone's circumstances are different; mine include always keeping an Admirals Club membership no matter what and equating $50 with "free.")

I think what CE's proposition is that we'd be better off with overall lower prices as opposed to coupons and various other ways businesses promote "breakage", which is why he's dismissive of the overall value proposition of frequent flyer plans.

But hey, maybe we could lure him here once he joins BA, to defend his own proposition. ;)

elliott is practically fiction, as he is the one doing the cherry picking.

free travel is free travel, especially high value economy, if not premium.